With more than 23,000 employees and 130+ stores across France, Leroy Merlin is the leading DIY retail brand in France – in the market of home improvement and gardening. The brand is not limited to an in-store offer. Leroy Merlin France also has a strong digital ecosystem with a fast growing website.

When you compare the user experience of insurance to that of retail, insurance is miles behind. Nick Mercer, UK sales manager at Loqate outlines what the industry needs to do to master the user’s experience

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Finding ways to create and maintain a relationship with your customers is the number one priority to many companies. Some companies are good at this while some are not. Technology really helped in this area but in most cases, it’s not the only answer.

Take apps, for example. They can be quite a double-edged sword. Starbucks, for instance, has a Breakfast on Us promotion where you get stickers each time you buy something from them and once you fill it out you get something for free. This works well for people who go to the store. But Starbucks also promotes their app – like crazy. And this is a problem because people who want to buy through the app often forget about the card and get no additional value. When they realize this, they get mad. And, their experience is ruined.

Mobile e-commerce used to be considered a “cherry on top” for desktop online retail. As smart mobile devices became more widespread and accessible, people began incorporating them into the e-commerce journey—but primarily to search and browse products rather than conduct transactions. This was due in part to the challenges associated with using mobile browsers of the past when it came to complex, multi-step interactions like checking out.

Rapidly developing smart retail will see three major trends in 2019, including an emphasis on the human side of business, according to CC Liu, secretary general of Asia AIoT Alliance.

Liu stressed that tech development originates from human nature, with all tech designs aimed at providing consumers with greater convenience. Accordingly designers must grasp users' situations well to provide better services. He continued that Amazon unmanned stores, for instance, allow consumers to take things from the store without having to pay at the counter.

The second trend is creating more convenient UI (user interface) and more friendly UX (user experience) to facilitate purchases, Liu said, adding that based on consumer psychology, consuming is quite an impulsive behavior and therefore how to shorten the transaction process will be crucial for further upgrades in smart retail operations.

The third trend is that smart retail will entail AI as the core. Liu said that AI is not almighty but serve as a helper to decision making. AI can be utilized to analyze big data to provide references for managers in handling distribution, pricing, marketing and new product development, while also further predicting market trends and facilitating customized services, according to Liu.

In this webinar, Mopinion is joined by special guests Stephan Brandenburg & Iris Rabenberg of major retail company, De Bijenkorf (part of Selfridges Group). These two share some interesting details on how they gather and get the most out of their online customer feedback data, from collection and the application of triggering techniques, to managing/structuring the data and their key findings.

For many retailers, improving the customer experience involves simplifying e-commerce to rely on fewer clicks and supplementing text search for the ever-potent, AI-powered visual search feature.

Whether it be for navigating outfit inspiration, as seen on platforms such as Pinterest and ShopStyle or creating hyper-personalized recommendations, witnessed in Spotify and Netflix, the bottom line is through these technologies, retailers further empower their shoppers and guide purchases.

In a similar mission, the winner of Digiday’s Best Retail Technology award, Syte, aims to provide a cutting-edge visual AI search, which offers the necessary immersive experience and improved user journey shoppers crave — all beginning with the shopper’s chosen image.

Would you like to gather real time feedback from your online visitors as they shop? Perhaps you are doing this already but struggle to manage the data and pick out the important trends? If so, tune in to our upcoming webinar where we will be joined by special guests Stephan Brandenburg & Iris Rabenberg of major retail company, De Bijenkorf (part of Selfridges Group). These two will share some interesting details of how they gather and get the most out of their online customer feedback data.

E-commerce business models are undergoing a dramatic shift. Initially businesses relied on consumers to do the 'heavy lifting' to discover the product and to make the purchase decision. The vendor's role was to ensure that the product was discoverable and — most importantly — available at the geographic location where the transaction potentially would take place.

But the new e-commerce business model is optimized by driving the consumer to subscribe to 'an experience.' Think of Spotify or Apple Music, for example. The customer purchases access to a seemingly endless supply of music and tools that ensure their experience is maximized. The focus of the experience moves from a 'warehouse experience' to more of a concierge, personalized and curated experience. The consumer has already purchased, and so the emphasis is placed on ensuring that they stay engaged and active. Most importantly, the service makes recommendations and learns what the consumer likes, making the discovery of music a delight. In this model the better the tools engage the customers the better the company will prosper.

If you’ve been paying attention to the application of artificial intelligence in retail, you may feel like the buzz around the topic has gone from zero to “arrived” in less than a year. In retail time, even at the speed of the modern consumer, that is incredibly fast.

Some of the hype has come from activity around specific use-cases for the application of AI in retail. While companies like Baidu profess over 100 AI capabilities, in retail it appears that use-cases are centering on four main areas:

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Mopinion is a proud sponsor of User Experience News. The voice of the online user is taking on an increasingly important role when it comes to improving websites and apps. So web analysts and digital marketeers are making more and more use of User Experience Tools in order to collect experience from the user. Mopinion takes it one step further and offers a solution to analyse and visualise User Experience results from your websites and apps wherever you need them. The real challenge for companies is not about capturing experience, it is about how to make sense of the data.